Unpleasant Stuffwww.cjr.org Joe Biden and the semiotics of old age
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The temperature dial, and who controls itwww.cjr.org On Sunday night, Ben Smith, the editor of Semafor, introduced his weekly media newsletter with the words “there isn’t always a media angle.” This struck me as a strange thing to write on a weekend whe...
The cynicism of blaming the media for the Trump assassination attemptwww.cjr.org On Saturday—shortly after a gunman attempted to assassinate Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania and killed Corey Comperatore, a Trump supporter—various observers remarked that a photo of a blood-s...
One year in, is Threads winning the battle to take over from Twitter?www.cjr.org A year ago, Meta—the parent company of Facebook and Instagram—launched a new social app called Threads. (I wrote about the launch and also did a Q&A with my CJR colleague Jon Allsop about my early exp...
Q&A: Joseph Lee on ‘Indigenous knowledge’ and covering adaptation to extreme weatherwww.cjr.org Joseph Lee, an author and freelance journalist, is a member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe from Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. In January, while researching a forthcoming book on Native identity...
Demystifying France’s ‘political miracle’www.cjr.org A week ago—after Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National (RN, or “National Rally” in English) and its allies won the first round of snap legislative elections in France—the world’s press trea...
What does the Washington Post newsroom want?www.cjr.org The ambient noise of any newsroom is grumbling—about colleagues, workloads, assignments, compensation, and (these days) the ever-present fear of layoffs and potential closures. Even by that standard i...
What did we know and when? Alex Thompson on investigating Biden’s mental declinewww.cjr.org Alex Thompson, a national political correspondent for Axios, first reported that President Biden had started wearing special sneakers, in part to reduce the risk of tripping, last fall. But until the ...
Q&A: John Kaag on American ‘wildness’ and what the Blood family says about the country’s foundingwww.cjr.org On the day that John Kaag, a philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, moved into his home in Concord, he found a privately published genealogy of the Blood family hidden behind ...
Journalists are preparing for an intense summer covering politicswww.cjr.org On an unusually hot Monday in April, around a dozen journalists gathered in the slightly lopsided brick building that houses the Bronx Documentary Center for a workshop on reporting safely during the ...
Why Biden’s debate performance was not a Wizard of Oz momentwww.cjr.org Early last month, the Wall Street Journal published a buzzy story that shined a light on President Biden’s advanced age and questioned his mental acuity. (“Behind Closed Doors,” the headline read, “Bi...
President Biden Has a Coldwww.cjr.org President Biden is unlikely to ever be compared to Picasso or a Ferrari. His voice, even at its best, is not an uninsurable jewel. But last night, it did seem to inspire a kind of psychosomatic nasal ...
Julian Assange is free, but troubling journalistic questions remainwww.cjr.org A video clip posted on social media sites on Monday showed Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, climbing the stairs to a private airplane that was parked on the tarmac at London’s Stansted airpor...
The Associated Press finds a new way to combat news desertswww.cjr.org Nonprofit news organizations including ProPublica, The Marshall Project, and The 19th have transformed the American media landscape in the past decade. But the Associated Press has been at it far long...
When they won’t even say ‘no comment’www.cjr.org As the author of CNN.com’s daily newsletter about the news and entertainment industries, Oliver Darcy regularly reports on some of the world’s most powerful communications companies. Some of those com...
Unconfirmablewww.cjr.org Fact-checking into oblivion, again.
Mindless Replywww.cjr.org In the realm of political disinformation, AI-generated deepfakes are not such a big problem. Our susceptibility to gossip is.
The F-Wordwww.cjr.org Data shows that cable networks are focused on Trump and fascism—as they never have been before.
Q&A: Xiao Qiang on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square and the right to information in Chinawww.cjr.org Thirty-five years ago this week, the Chinese Communist Party sent troops into Tiananmen Square, in central Beijing, to suppress a student protest. With global media present and filming, soldiers opene...
A local reporter was arrested for doing her job. The Supreme Court needs to step in.www.cjr.org In 2017, police in Laredo, Texas, issued an arrest warrant for Priscilla Villarreal Treviño, a citizen journalist who runs a bilingual Facebook page with more than two hundred thousand followers—nearl...
Ten big questions on AI and the newswww.cjr.org In early May, Aspen Digital—a program of the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit organization devoted to the discussion of social issues—convened nearly a hundred news executives, editors, representatives of...
Seeing the signswww.cjr.org Earlier this month, Jodi Kantor, of the New York Times, reported that in the days after the insurrection in January 2021, an upside-down American flag flew outside the home of Samuel Alito, the conser...
Why the media should listen to voters’ ‘wrong’ answers in pollswww.cjr.org My colleagues at The Guardian released a poll earlier this week with some truly eye-popping numbers: nearly 60 percent of Americans believe that the country is in a recession, and around half think th...
Some publishers fear that Google’s AI-powered search will be a catastrophewww.cjr.org Whenever Google makes a change to its search product, it inevitably generates a lot of anxiety among news outlets, many of which rely on the revenue they get from traffic driven by the platform. But t...
Q&A: Stanis Bujakera Tshiamala on reporting, imprisonment, and an attempted coup in the DRCwww.cjr.org On Sunday, Christian Malanga—an opponent of Felix Tshisekedi, the president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo—and a group of supporters that reportedly included three American citizens attacked ...
How Israeli journalists cover their own countrywww.cjr.org Haaretz is one of Israel’s most respected newspapers. It’s also one of the few willing to openly criticize the government for its treatment of Palestinians. The Kicker speaks with Hagar Shezaf and Ome...
How Biden and Trump kneecapped the media with their debate dealwww.cjr.org Joe Biden and Donald Trump may have just taunted each other into a pair of presidential debates—but in doing so, they further undercut the power of news organizations to make sure the debates are run ...